This is especially important as organizations need a holistic strategy to build their existing capabilities to adjust to new initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and factory of the future.

Adopting Gartner’s five stage manufacturing maturity model helps organizations advance in three main ways: identifying current maturity levels an identify which dimensions are lagging, making a plan that leverages current practices to prioritize necessary changes and engaging stakeholders while road-mapping programs to incrementally mature operations.

Here’s more on each.

Assess Current Capabilities

Gartner’s maturity model features dimensions that define each maturity stage. By seeing which dimensions fit the description of your organization, you can see what stage your organization is currently in.

Those dimensions are: goal, process, organization, performance management and technology. You can read more about each in our previous post.

Although the dimensions may vary a little from organization to organization, they are a good unit of measure for a general idea of where your manufacturing processes stand.

Make A Plan for Change

Once you know where your organization falls on the maturity charts, you can see what the maturity stages ahead of yours looks like.

Based on these markers, leadership can make a roadmap for transitioning to the next levels of manufacturing performance. They have defined goals of what to aspire to and a clear path of how to get there through improving their processes.

This plan should not look to create new processes, but to improve upon current practices in a way that better aligns with Industry 4.0 and digitalization initiatives.

Support Development of Future Manufacturing Operations with the Supply Chain

The plan for change isn’t useful until it’s put into action. That action is something that happens over time with the help of many other people.

Leaders can use the model to engage stakeholders and roadmap programs that incrementally mature manufacturing operations over time. By showing them clear-cut stages and the benefits and opportunities that go along with each stage, leaders can make the case for investing in the initiatives that are necessary for these goals.

That way, there can be a gradual maturation with continual improvement efforts across the organization.

Overcoming Challenges

These steps definitely come with their fair share of challenges. Many leaders are used to operating in a traditional way that may impede the maturation process. Some of the challenges currently facing manufacturing organizations include:

Focusing only on short term goals or the current market

Enabling a culture that prioritizes comfort over innovation, adaptation and evolution

Failing to utilize production performance information to make informed decisions

Lacking the understanding of current performance

But by taking a leap of faith by investing in digitalization and maturation initiatives can have benefits for manufacturing that far outweigh the challenges.